Listen to thisI have been following one of the CYC-Net threads on “the role of professionals" with particular interest as it is close to my heart. In the early 1990s, my students used to be referred to patronisingly as “Care Bears" by students from Business, Science and Engineering Faculties. Indeed, I sometimes heard other Instructors call my students Care Bears and this infuriated me. One day, I raised this over coffee and a throwaway comment really struck me. The Instructor said, “How can we take your programme seriously when there isn’t even a basic textbook in the area. What other course could have that?" And you know, he was right. Why did social care not have a textbook when one considers that formal education and training began in 1970? As the comment was made in 1995, this gave us a 25 year window for someone either from practice or management or a college to write a book to say “this is what we do" and yet nothing appeared on the library shelves.
At the annual conference of the Irish Association for Social Care Education, the missing textbook was raised once again and I am delighted to announce to the CYC-Online readership this month that work has commenced on editing a text book on Child and Youth Care in Ireland with approximately 16 authors from Ireland and two from Canada (Dr Thom Garfat in Quebec and Dr Grant Charles in BC). Our aspiration is that the book will go thru its final editing during the summer of 2003 and will be available to students for the commencement of their studies in Term One, September 2003.
This book should prove to be influential in that students will see “their own" contributing to the emerging discourse. Students will be given a positive message that their future work is important enough to warrant a textbook. Their parents will see the textbook in their local bookstores and be able to leaf through it. I might even go so far as to suggest that some international students and practitioners might be interested in our collective work, such is the way of CYC-NET these days with the diversity of debate being generated. More and more, the debates in Canadian and South African Child and Youth Care match those here in Ireland.
This book has been a long time in gestation. It was individually flagged by at least three authors that I know of over the past decade – one of them being myself! For several reasons, the textbook was not written and Irish students have had to rely on texts from the UK, United States and Canada over the years. As social care practice becomes more and more complex, “clients” present with more problematised behaviours and society has greater expectations around measurable outcomes, students need to be more aware of what is specific to the Irish Child and Youth Care experience. Students need to come to know the history of Child and Youth Care provision and education and the key areas of work – residential child care, project/community care and day care.
I might cite an example here from reading thru Brian Gannon's work on Child and Youth Care in South Africa where pay scales differ vastly from those in Ireland. Why is this the case? It is not that the direct work with clients undertaken in South Africa is vastly different from that in Ireland. It has much more to do with the history of that country and the prevailing political constellations of power dynamics. Thus, a student needs to know the history of Child and Youth Care in her own country. Also, having co-presented a workshop on rural “at risk” youth in Alberta, Canada earlier this year I am aware that the Canadian understanding of “rural” and the Irish understanding are very different. So too are many of the Child and Youth Care programmes on offer. One has only to think of the sexual health programmes available in cities such as Toronto, Ottawa or Vancouver and compare these to those available in Dublin, Limerick or Cork. When Dr. Kevin Lalor and I co-wrote a book on prostitution in 1997, our statistics were greeted with some degree of cynicism – but since then there have been many publications and conferences on this theme and we have moved forward. The point I want to make is that each Child and Youth Care system deserves its own textbook detailing the journey undertaken in that system.
What excites me about the textbook is the fact that one educator/Instructor from each of the constituent member colleges of the Irish Association for Social Care Education has agreed to contribute a chapter. This, allied to our noted North American contributors of Thom and Grant will ensure a readable and interesting contribution to the emerging Child and Youth Care literature here in Ireland. Dr Perry Share, the Head of Department of Humanities at Sligo Institute of Technology and myself will edit the book.
Below is our proposed table of contents for readers. Perhaps people might make suggestions to me if you feel Perry and I have omitted anything that deserves to be here!
ChapterTitle
1 Editors' Introduction
2 The development of social care education in Ireland
3 Social care: The international perspective
4 Attachment and bonding
5 Law and social care
6 Ethics and social care
7 Gender and social care
8 Supervision in social care
9 Use of self in social care
10 Community child care
11 Project work in social care
12 Residential child care
13 Social care and disability
14 Older adults in social care
15 Multi-disciplinary teamwork
16 Working in social care
17
Interface between social care and social work
In the meantime, have a restful summer.
